Reflections of an integral mind and heart on life, love, sex, God, healing, psychotherapy and everything.

Coloured portrait

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Loving Dad

A story of healing the soul of my family and turning fear
and resentment into love

The happiest memories of my Dad and I are the first ones
that I can recall. They involve apples, a yellow jackknife and a bench in the
park. Dad used to hold me on his knees, and feed me apple slices freshly carved
out – the sweetest apples I have ever eaten. I also remember him protectively
teaching me my name, age and address, just in case I ever got lost; he also
taught me which is left and which is right, and how to ride a bike. Then I grew
up a bit, enough to be reproached things I that do wrong, or that I should, or shouldn’t do – and be
punished for it.

I was a bed wetter. I didn’t want to wet the bed, and used
the best of my will and imagination to make myself wake up for bathroom – and I
did, each time, only, one minute too late. Mom took me to a hypnotherapist.

The hypnotherapist wore a doctor’s white robe, and had a
deep, calming voice. He had me lie down on the consultation bed, asked me to
close my eyes, and, with his deep, calming voice, he proceeded to say: “It’s
night time, the sky is dark blue, and all the stars are out. The crickets are
singing and the moon shines over the land. It’s peaceful and quiet...” His
voice stopped after a while, and it was all silent. Not sure what to expect, I
asked Doctor Hypnotherapy: “Do I have to lie like this for much longer?”. The
Doctor took a deep breath, and started all over again: “It’s night time. It’s
dark, the stars are out, and the crickets are singing “. After a while, he
stopped. I was bored: “What else?” I asked. The Doctor shrugged, looked at my
Mom and said: “I’m sorry, Ma’am, I can’t hypnotise your daughter.” And that was
that.

Dad had another approach. He’d send me to pee before bed
time (‘But Dad, it’s not coming!’) and he’d consistently punish me after the
bed wetting, admonishing me on a harsh voice, demanding that I stand facing a
corner of the room for a few minutes, or – my worst one – locking away my
favorite doll or toy. I tried to please him but I couldn’t help it. Little by
little, I started fearing him.

Both my parents were employed professionals, Dad an
electrical engineer, and Mom an economist, and university assisting professor.
We always had house help that lived with us in our small one-bedroom apartment,
a woman who’d be both housekeeper and Nanny for me, their only child. I grew
jealous of the Nannies, who would come and go, and yet, every new face in our
home was invested with the authority to discipline me. In one bout of
resentment, I called my Nanny “Cow”. Dad removed his leather belt and beat me
with it. He didn’t have to do it often: one stern look piercing through my eyes
was enough to silence me, together with his severe voice: “You should be
ashamed of yourself!”; “Don’t you talk back to me, you cheeky girl!” and, when
I’d lower my eyes in shame, he’d thunder: “You look at me when I’m talking to
you!”

Mom added to my fear of Dad by either threatening to tell
him about anything I’d do that she’d deem unacceptable, or encouraging me to
hide things from him that she’d approve of but he wouldn’t, like when I’d
accompany her to the beauty salon and get my nails polished with red. Eventually, Dad would get a glimpse of my
painted nails, when I’d forget to keep them behind my back, and yell at Mom: “Go
get that shit removed from the child’s nails right now!”. I think my mother
feared him as well.

When I was in school, and I’d bring home a low mark, I’d
pretend to be sleepy and take a long afternoon nap around the time my father
would return home from work, just to postpone the dire confrontation. By the
time I was a student, all I felt towards Dad was fear, the frustration of
failing to please him, and the resentment for his control over my decisions and
for his put-downs and reproaches. In my family, there was no tradition of
expressing appreciation or acknowledgment, but there always was a generous and
daily expression of blaming, shaming and reproaching. When my mother became
mentally ill, and after a few years died, I felt lost and alone, and could
hardly wait to turn eighteen and get the hell out of my father’s home and of
the country, to make sure that I was free.

I was, in fact, twenty four when I finally left, and left my
father behind, but what I wasn’t aware that I packed and brought with me was
the fear, frustration, rejection and resentments. That was my personal import into
my new, adoptive country; and it was so heavy, they should have taxed it and
made a fortune from it.

But neither the State of Israel, nor I, were aware of this
baggage, because it was unconscious. I slowly became aware of it with reading self-help
books and getting therapy which helped me flash a light inside my mind. I went
from feeling not-good-enough to feeling righteously angry at my parents,
especially my father. Every time we visited each other, I was triggered by
things he would say, and could hardly wait to get away from him, again, and
again.

The healing began when I decided to inquire into my father’s
experiences as a child. I was visiting Romania, and on a balmy evening, we were
sitting on a bench in the Herastrau park, in Bucharest: me, my Dad, and Eliza,
my stepmom.

I found out that my grandmother was not generous with
affection or appreciation, but rather strict with her boys, Dad and his older
brother, who was her favorite. My Dad’s father was a kind, compassionate man,
softer than his wife – a well-reputed obstetrician with a heart bigger than the
pocket, nicknamed the Doctor of the poor in his town of Bacau, because he would
not charge the patients who couldn’t afford him, and if they didn’t afford the
prescribed medicine, he would dispense it to them at no charge.

Dad was twelve when his father died of a stroke. My
grandmother had worked as her husband’s assistant, and now that he was gone,
the family had no more income to subsist. At twelve, my father saw the end of
his childhood, when he took on a physically demanding job carrying heavy bags
on his still developing body. He lost his childhood, his joy of life, and the
health of his spine. He became as strict as his mother, a severe, controlling
but loyal provider for his chosen family – my mother and I.

Listening to his story, my heart softened a bit: I felt for
him, and sitting on that bench in the evening dark, I looked at my father, and
for the first time I saw, instead of a scary control freak, a sad, scared,
tired little boy.

Around the year 1999 I embarked on my journey as a healer,
leaving a nine-year career in banking and the corporate world, for the ethereal
and not-so-well-paid, but deeply rewarding world of inner exploration and transformation –
the world of the healing arts and therapies. I started connecting the dots
between my couple relationship dysfunction and my childhood experiences, and
began to understand more and more how to make amends.

One of my teachers, the German systemic therapist Bert
Hellinger, observed that the flow of love has its own hidden order in each
family system: love flows naturally from the old ones to the young ones, from
grandparents, to parents, to children; and when somebody swims upstream, like a
child who gives emotional support to a parent, or a parent who uses his or her
child for emotional support, the flow of love is impaired and everyone in that
family system is affected.

I decided to apply this observation in the healing of my own
soul, and in my own family, and proceeded to request for emotional support from
my surviving parent, my Dad.

One day I was on the phone with my father when he pushed a
button on a Valentine plush toy that I had gifted him, which said, in English, ‘I
love you’. I said: ‘Dad, I need to hear this from your own voice!’.

‘I love you’ said my father in English, imitating the voice
of the toy.

‘Dad, not like this. I need to hear it from you in Romanian.’

Dead silence at the other end. After a long while, I heard
my father taking a deep breath and saying, in Romanian; ‘I love you more than I
could ever put in words’. With hearing his statement, I felt the rush of a mighty
current up my spine. I was in my forties, and blown away by this declaration
from Dad, which I hadn’t hoped to hear, and was now healing my mind and
emotions. No psychotherapy could mend a pained psyche like my father declaring
me love.

When I moved to Canada, putting an Ocean between him and me,
Dad bought a PC and downloaded Skype to be able to be in touch with me. One
day, after a Polish airplane full of dignitaries crashed, I was talking on
Skype with my father and stepmother, who had been shaken by this piece of news.
Dad wanted to talk about the recent events,
which at that hour I was still oblivious of. I was used with Dad’s little
reproaches when we talked: ‘What? You don’t have a comb to comb your fuzzy
hair?’. This day it was: ‘What? You don’t read the news?’

‘No, Dad.’

‘But how is it possible to live like this, not knowing what’s
happening in the world?’

‘I read other aspects of what’s happening in the world, Dad’

Dad wouldn’t let go: ‘But what kind of living is this, what
kind of world is it that you live in, without reading or listening to the news?’

And on and on it went, until I got so triggered emotionally,
I became again Dad’s little good-for-nothing girl. And I cried, and cried.

Then I remembered to make amends, and asked my father: ‘Dad,
I need to hear from you what you like and appreciate about me.’

Eliza jumped in with a few compliments, and I stopped her,
and continued to address my father: ‘Dad, from all the people in the world, I
need to hear it from you, for my own mental health. I’ll make it easy for you: it
can be physical, character or behaviour. I just need to hear something –
anything - that you like about me.’

I saw my father wipe a tear at the corner of his eye. Easy
it was not, and if I asked him to move a mountain an inch to the left, it would
have been as easy for him.

Next time I spoke to him on Skype, he looked at me and said:
‘I like your pendant’.

It was a start.

By the end of 2010 when I visited Romania again, I was
further equipped for healing my relationship with Dad: I was practicing Shadow
Work and Self-Inquiry. Shadow Work allowed me to identify and own any trait
that I recognized in my father or step-mother, which bothered and triggered me.
The moment I would go through the silent mental process of integration, I’d
look at my father and tell myself: ‘Here we are, two critical, or judgmental complainers’
– and any fear or resentment would just drop away. I was turning fifty and for
the first time ever, I could feel warm affection towards and from him. I used
the ‘Who am I?’ self-inquiry practice to expand my identity beyond the boundaries
of the separate self; so whenever Dad would utter another complaint or
reproach, and after owning the same trait and behavior in myself, I’d expand to
recognize a general human suffering taking the shape and form of my father’s
pain; and this recognition blew my heart open in the compassionate desire to
alleviate this pain not only in myself and in my family, but in this entire
world that I am a part of.

So one day during that visit, something most unexpected happened.
I was in the living room with Eliza, chatting, while Dad was in the bedroom. I
yelled from the living room to my father: ‘So Dad, what is it that you like
about me, as a person?

Walking towards me, Dad replied: ‘That you have evolved so
much, more than I ever thought possible. And that you are able to help people
the way you do.’

I felt my chest open like a warm flow of red-hot lava, a
kind of affectionate love I had not known for my father. The language I had
just heard was made of words that I hadn’t thought my Dad would have the
ability to utter. For the first time ever, I felt my father’s love for me, and
even more surprising and healing: I felt my own love for him. During the months
to come, I’d periodically rub my eyes in disbelief, wondering whether this love
would last. So far, so good, and it gets better.

I saw my Dad last month, after a long suffering and
difficult surgery that he went through. I was afraid I wouldn’t get to see him
alive, and I prayed day and night for his health. I spent two weeks with him
and Eliza, and the imminent loss shaping up with old age and illness magnified
the affection I felt for him. I found a hunched, weak, pale and depressed old
man who had lost his zest for life – still controlling and problem oriented,
but too weak to scare me. Somehow my childhood Dad and my now-Dad became two
people, one to heal from, and the other to love. Or perhaps I had distinguished
within my mind between the doing and the doer, and while I still refer to ‘doing’
in my mental care practice, I have forgiven and embrace the ‘doer’. Inspired by
Hellinger, I had mentally told Dad what I often invite my clients to say to
their parents in a family constellation session: ‘I am your daughter, and you are
my father. If you only gave me life, and nothing more, it would have been enough.
I say YES to this life, and I promise to make something good of it.’

But Dad, you gave me so
much more than life: you provided and made sure that I had all the food,
shelter, clothing, health care and education I needed. You instilled in me the
love of education and learning. You taught me practical tools for survival when
I was a child, and you taught me how to ride a bicycle. You never left sight of
me, and when my mother passed away, you cooked all my meals, and fed me. I am
who I am today thanks to you, Dad.

This time I hugged my father like never before. We used to
have brief hugs, with Dad patting my back in his awkwardness with displays of
affection. Blame it on my Biodanza practice, but this time around I held my
father tight in my arms, running my hands around his hunched, tight back until
I could feel it softening and warming up a bit. And we kissed each other’s
cheeks, and held on each other until we’d melt in each embrace, until my father’s
pale cheeks turned a bit rosy, until I saw a smile on his face and even his
famous smirk when cracking a wise-ass joke.

Screw-ups and suffering runs in my family for who-knows how
many generations, and in all this long line of ancestors, I am the youngest
one, and the most privileged one as well, because I am able to bring healing to
the soul of my family, and alleviate this long lineage of suffering. My
sister-like friend Dana always says: ‘Those who have give to those who don’t
have’. She mostly talks about money. But the ability to heal and make amends is
more precious than gold, and those who have it give it to those who don’t. I am
the lucky one to turn fear and resentment into love, and to hear my father say
to me upon hugging for our good-byes: ‘Au
fost doua saptamani de vis’ – ‘These were two fabulous weeks’.

7 comments:

Thank you Tana. I resonate with your story. I too have been engaged in a long process of healing my relationship with my mother. After reflecting on a telephone conversation with her this evening and the energy it expended, your blog touched me with its meaning and gave me hope. Thank you Dorothy

Thank you, Dorothy. I, too, have been inspired and encouraged by a friend when doubting, fearing and hesitating in relating with Dad. I wish you and your Mom the breakthrough that will free both of you to love and enjoy each other!

Keep writing Tana.... I loved reading this... When you first wrote it, i read it so briefly I couldn't fully appreciate it... This time I read it with all my heart... i don't know if you meant to invoke tears, or if you were crying as you wrote this, but I am sitting here as a little girl, grown woman, crying, yet proud and happy... I love this blog post... :)

Thank you, Pippa, for your kind words, for encouraging me to keep writing, and for reading this post with an open heart. I must have cried when I wrote it, and cried again when I re-read it to connect with what you felt.